goodbye Sophia*
*my car
A few weeks ago, I said goodbye to my car. It was time to sell it, but it was bittersweet. I thought of the many versions of myself the car has carried over time, and thus the versions of myself it won’t carry as time goes on. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve cried, laughed, sang, talked to myself in that car, but every moment is precious. Every moment added together makes up my life.
I took my last drive in her (I often said ‘her’, like the car is a boat and I’m a captain; is this really weird?) on September 14, and I recorded myself talking for almost 25 minutes (I do this on occasion when I need my words out of my head). I also wrote down a bunch of keywords and memories. Here are a some of them:
2014 kia soul, silver
sophia [the most popular baby girl name of 2014 (the year of the car)]
good visibility
steering wheel light as a feather, turns on a dime
hamster mobile
“It was always there. A stable form of freedom…I could go on long drives and just think, or not think…feel or not feel, listen to music, or have some time by myself where I wasn’t on my phone and where I wasn’t having to pretend. I was just myself, acting instinctually and mechanically. I loved it… There’s a sense of control driving that you don’t get doing almost anything else.”
piles of people
the same smell, always
drive-thrus
crying so hard i can’t see the road
an infinite number of car selfies
“The point is that I had so many memories in this car with so many people, significant people, and they all, I don’t know, they made me who I was. Having a big enormous keychain with a hamster toy on it, it was a part of me. Being able to drive was a part of me, being the driver in the group was a part of me. Being responsible and showing up and taking care of people even when it sometimes pissed me off and made me resentful, that was part of me…not the best part of me, but a part of me nonetheless.”
“I let myself be a little bit more of a teenager. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do. And I had a safe place to do it. I was safe in my car. I was safe here in ways that I didn’t feel like I was other places. I had so many moments of feeling like ‘I’m okay right now because I’m here.’”
“It’s another moment of me saying goodbye. Saying goodbye to my childhood and to my old life and having to be okay creating a new one. So I feel the need to say something. To have some sort of moment where I’m acknowledging the person, the people, that I used to be and moving on from that, moving forward, saying ‘That’s someone I was,’ "‘Those are a million somebodies that I was in a million different moments and I’m going to miss her… and I’m also really excited to not be her anymore.’”
“I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that I wanna say, that I wanna record, but I guess this is just what I wanted. I wanted to be able to talk, to do my thing, my voice memo thing, get this out of me, feel something and feel it out loud.”
“I’m going to miss you so much. I will always cherish every single moment I got to spend in here. I treasure the person that you allowed me to be inside these walls. And I’m happy to not take for granted places where I got to be myself in a time where I felt like myself was a burden. And I am happy for all of my growth since then.”
“I’m just saying the same thing over and over again, but it’s hard. I’m afraid to turn off the recording because then I am saying the goodbye is over. I just want to do my favorite thing in the world and listen to music in my car.”
My last words:
I’m an incredibly sentimental person. This, all of this, may be overkill to some people. But this was a moment of mourning I needed, one I really cherished, one that I wouldn’t want to give up.
And I know this car meant something to a lot of people, not just me. What a testament to the things that fill our lives.
